When designing electronic forms (or a form to be filled out on a computer) for similar business functions, it is a common practice to use templates for simplifying the design process. However, many electronic programs for form design either do not support templates for forms or rely on complicated yet limited template configuration mechanisms. For example, a form configuration tool based on XLST (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) may require a designer to express form adaptation in XLST language. However, such a complicated process defies the purpose of form design by adapting an existing form.
Besides, many design platforms are not optimized to use an existing form as a template for generating other forms. Even if it is possible to adapt a form template in these design platforms, the adaptation process may be costly in both human and computing resources. As a result, the design cycle based on form adaptation may be prolonged and the approach becomes practically undesirable.
In addition, adapting or changing a template to derive new form designs may be subject to many design constraints or requirements, for example, design guidelines or styles depending on specific business needs. Often times, it is labor intensive and error prone to manually enforce such constraints or requirements when adapting a form. Therefore, existing methods for form adaptation may be inefficient, ineffective or even frustrating to use.